An Atlanta woman has come forward to CNN as the U.S. voice of Siri, the built-in “personal assistant” first introduced in the iPhone 4S. Susan Bennett says she first discovered that her voice was being used on Apple’s smartphones when a friend emailed her and asked if it was her voice on the iPhone commercial. She headed to the Apple website to discover that she had unknowingly provided the voice for the system with samples she recorded in July of 2005, a full six years before the phone’s launch.
Bennett says she had no idea that the voice samples would be used by Apple and that her work also appears on many GPS units and other devices, including the first ATM.
Previously, an Australian morning show interviewed the voice actress who provided the voice for Siri in that country. The interview can be seen below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMbtOo02ALI
Oh and today is Siri’s ‘Birthday’
It is Siri's birthday today! pic.twitter.com/YHFPJi4uNX
— Benjamin Mayo (@bzamayo) October 4, 2013
@9to5mac @BenjaminZAMayo
I got this pic.twitter.com/P0l5vPtn8Q— Jared (@Home_Jared) October 4, 2013
@9to5mac @BenjaminZAMayo I just asked this and got this reply from her. pic.twitter.com/FTSnWprtWh
— Sajin Seethi (@sajinseethi) October 4, 2013
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I used to work years ago for Dorling Kindersley & one of the DTP Designers there had the 1st name Siri
Lol Siri is a common name here in Sri Lanka!! :D
Voice samples recorded in 2005 ?? That is just plain impossible. Even if they had her speak many sentences and combos, still Siri got tweaked many times already and it surely needed more samples to achieve the correct results.
I wouldn’t say impossible by any means. Recording voice samples for these things usually include specific groups of letters pronounced in different ways making just random sounds when by themselves, but can be pieced together to form different words or changes in the future.
The samples weren’t done for Siri, nor had anything to do with Apple. Her voice has been on Garmin GPS units since day one, as well as used for numerous other applications licensing voices from Nuance, who owns the voice rights
The Siri voice has been on the Mac for text to speech for years. I immediately recognized the voice as that of “Samantha” from OS X when Siri first came out. The voice samples are from 2005.
Reblogged this on William's iBlog.
I thought it was Allison Duffy… http://www.wimp.com/voicesiri/
Is there any way one can send a “tip” to Siri? Through iTunes, perhaps. And does Apple take 30% of it, the way they do for music?
Poor Koothrappali. Dreamed with some woman like Scarlett Johansson calling him Sexy and… well… he was wrong…
Bazinga
CNN.com has a great profile.
If I were her I wouldn’t want my name associated with that product.
Siri’s, ..er…Susan Bennett’s snippy voice and quirky personality stands in contrast to the golden age of telephone operators who possessed “the voice with a smile”Take a look
http://wp.me/p2qifI-1Ii
I have liked “The Big Bang Theory” version better